The “to do” list is a familiar item for many persons to track tasks that must be done both at work and at home. Such lists commonly include the things they need to accomplish on a particular day, in a particular week, or in a particular month or year. Often these “to-do” lists are for job-related tasks (such as projects, meetings, phone calls, etc.), family- or home-related tasks (such as chores, family vacations, etc.), or personal tasks (such as errands, exercising, etc.).
Frequently, people can forget to create to-do lists for these tasks, and can ultimately forget to perform these tasks. In other instances, people may have tasks in common with others (such as a husband sharing a common task with his wife, such as making reservations for a wedding anniversary dinner), but may fail to communicate or share these tasks with others.
Currently known task management systems fail to solve these and other problems, and have even created additional problems with regard to sharing tasks among a variety of users. These systems can be cumbersome to use and make it difficult for users to share tasks with others. A drawback of many known task management systems is that they may require a single administrator to set all permissions of the system, or they require users to explicitly set permissions of each task created, such as by explicitly setting permissions for those users with whom the user desires to share a task. Another drawback is that a user may not be able to specify which tasks to share with others, but may only have the option of sharing all tasks with others, and then have to manually select those tasks which the user would like to maintain as private. Thus, as the number of tasks pertaining to a user steadily increases, the chore of maintaining and setting permissions of the tasks becomes increasingly cumbersome.
Because of the permissions model of many current systems, these systems also make it difficult for a first user to see the tasks assigned to another user. A first user may desire to see tasks assigned to a variety of other users in order to determine which user is the least busy, so as to then assign a task to that user. However, in many instances, a first user may only be able to see tasks assigned to a second user if the second user has explicitly enabled the first user to see his tasks. Thus, when a user desires to assign a task to another user, he may not be able to first determine how busy the other user is prior to assigning him a task.
“Spam” email has become a common problem with users of electronic mail systems, and this problem has the potential to pervade known task management systems. Because of the threat of “spam”, known task management systems are restricted to a limited audience, thus preventing the sharing of tasks among a wide variety of users.
Therefore, there is a need for improved systems and methods for shared task management which solves these and other problems.